Date: Tue, 7 Mar 1995 10:47:00 EST
From: Electronic Products Magazine <0004276021[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]MCIMAIL.COM>
Subject: Re: the Ozarks and other plurals
An Irish colleague tells me that the British use of "their" instead of
"it" to modify collective nouns is just a matter of how people think.
In the British world, a company or a nation is thought of as
comprising people--therefore the plural. In the U.S., we sometimes
think of a company as a, well, corporate unit, hence an "it."
"Trades unions," my friend reports, are in the British world unions that comprise many trades. A "trade union" would be a union for one
trade. Usage I guess has a lot to do with counting, a mathematical
approach to grammar.
Leonard Schiefer
Chief Copy Editor
Electronic Products Magazine
lschiefer[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]mcimail.com